Entertainment

Hamilton Comic Con ready to (honour) Rumble

Participants battle in the inaugural Royal Rumble, which took place on Jan. 24, 1988, in Hamilton. The first Rumble match was a 20-man bout that aired on USA Network, not pay-per-view. "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan, who drew No. 13, won the inaugural Rumble Match by eliminating One Man Gang. (Credit World Wrestling Entertainment)

The Royal Rumble. It’s one of World Wrestling Entertainment’s signature events, one that carves a direct path for its winner to one of the main events of WrestleMania, the pinnacle for any professional wrestler.

Thirty enter, one remains.

This January in Philadelphia, WWE will host the 30th consecutive Rumble.

This weekend in Hamilton, where it all began, some of the original participants of the first Rumble will gather for a reunion as the Hamilton Comic Con marks its fifth birthday.

On hand at the annual event will be Pat Patterson, the Canadian mastermind behind the idea of the Royal Rumble, the event's first winner, Hacksaw Jim Duggan, and initial participants One Man Gang, the Killer Bees (Jim Brunzell and B Brian Blair) and Nikolai Volkoff. As well, wrestling icons Shawn Michaels and Road Warrior Animal will be in Hamilton this weekend.

For Duggan, a WWE Hall of Famer who, along with Volkoff, remains the only active wrestler from the original Rumble at age 63, winning the Rumble was an important part of his career.

"I was shocked,” Duggan recalled of when he was told he would be the winner that night nearly three decades ago. “I was grateful, too. Obviously, (it was) the biggest feather in my cap. I'm proud to have it."

The man he eliminated to score that coveted win also recalled being humbled by the opportunity to a finalist.

"To be honest, the main thing I remember is finding out me and Duggan were going to be the last two, which amazed me. I had no idea," said George Gray, better known under his wrestling personae of One Man Gang and Akeem. He didn't know until the day of the event that he would be going to the end. "They give you the number that you're going to go out at and then the number that you're going to go on out of the ring. It ended up me and Duggan being the last two and I just remember charging him and he pulled the top rope on me and I took a little bump over the top rope. That's basically what I remember about it."

To this day, Duggan said, fans still talk about his Rumble win.

"Thirty years ago,” he marvelled, before wisecracking: “It seems more like maybe eight."

While Duggan still gets inside the squared circle in a limited capacity, Gray’s in-ring days are behind him.

"I had a good career,” Gray said from a government-issued trailer parked in front of his Baton Rouge home, which was heavily damaged in severe flooding in 2016 and which he expects to be completed in the next couple of months. “Most of my career was in the territories, but I did spend three or four years in WWF/WWE, a little time in WCW a couple of times. ... I pretty much spent the rest of my time on the independents."

Duggan is a rarity in wrestling, having wrestled in parts five decades and still going in his sixties.

"It says an awful lot,” he said of the fact that he’s one of only two wrestlers who fought in Hamilton in 1988 still competing today, albeit sporadically. “What a lot of folks don't realize is how competitive wrestling is. People say, 'Ah, wrestling's wrestling.' I try to tell folks that if you look at it as a business, there are 1,500 NFL football players, there are 600 NBA basketball players. There are roughly 100 WWE wrestlers. With television, it's more competitive than sports. And it's not just kids from North America. There are people from Japan or Australia .. Europe ... everybody wants to be a WWE wrestler. It's extremely competitive. So to be able to stay around this long is something that I'm really proud of.”

His trademark wit again emerged.

“I always joke when I say in the WWF, I wrestled (Ted) DiBiase, Dusty (Rhodes) and (Cowboy Bob) Orton (and) in the WWE I wrestled Dusty's kid, DiBiase's kid and Orton's kid. First I beat up the old man, then I beat up the kid .... Hooooooo!"

While both men have long since left their full-time wrestling careers behind, both still marvel at the fact that fans around the world remember their contributions to wrestling, and that inaugural Rumble.

“It amazes me any time I go to an event for a signing or whatever, it amazes me that people have such long memories,” Gray said. “It just amazes me because I can't even remember, to be honest. Thanks to YouTube and the WWE Network, I guess it kind of keeps you alive. I'm not as well known as some of the stars today, but the older 1980s people, the ‘90s people, they pretty much say, 'Oh, yeah, I remember, I loved Akeem.' I get that a lot at signings. That's nice. It amazes me."

Duggan described it as “humbling.”

“I'll be signing an autograph at a comic con and I'll have a bunch of kids and young people at the front of my line and I'll look in the back and there'll be this big, tough and gruff looking man. I'm signing and he's coming down the line and finally he'll get up to me, he'll grab my hand and squeeze it and look me in the eye and he'll go, 'Hacksaw Duggan, me and my dad, we used to watch you on TV together.' It's humbling that folks remember you and you affected their lives so much."

And while Duggan went into the history books at the inaugural Rumble, One Man Gang left his mark too, being credited with six eliminations in the event, by far the most that day.

"I had no idea about the eliminations part,” the humble Gray said. “I have no memory of that at all. It's still a good thing to say you were in the first one. I guess they liked it because they still use it."

Asked about the challenges of a rumble match versus singles or tag-team action, both men confessed that the rumble style matches are among the easiest in all of wrestling.

“We're there early in the day. They give us the lineup and what order we're actually going to the ring and then from there, you figure what number they want you eliminated,” Gray said. “Everybody stays in there for a certain amount of time and then start doing the eliminations. I'll give you the word, you charge, I'll dump you over.” The only challenge he remembers having to overcome was being careful not to be accidentally eliminated by hanging over the ropes too far. “Once they started teetering me over the top rope, and I'm not supposed to go out, once that weight starts going a certain way, it's hard to stop. That was always a hard time for me in battle royals and Royal Rumbles was once they start working on you and about five or six guys are trying to put you over the top, it's way hard to keep that balance. I'd be telling them hold on to me, don't let me go whatever you do. If gravity takes over, it's over."

The Rumble, Duggan said, was just a new take on the battle royals of old.

"We'd all done battle royals up to that time,” he said. “It was unique in that not everybody started in the ring. This was a new concept with guys coming down every so often. But to actually be in the ring, in a battle royal or the Royal Rumble, it's actually one of the easier shows to be in. All you've got to do is know who goes out before you and who's putting you out. So you go to the ring and you're battling away and if Junkyard Dog goes out before me, I see Dog disappear, boom, I know it's my [turn]. I know who's going to put me out, I find him in the ring, boom, we do our spot, I'm gone. The guy who's after me sees me gone, boom. It's the easiest one of all. Plus you've got the cream of the crop of professional wrestling out there. There are mess-ups out there, but nobody sees them."

Gray, who admitted he hasn’t watched pro wrestling since Stone Cold Steve Austin ruled the WWE, said he believes this will be his first trip back to Hamilton since that inaugural Rumble.

"I think this will be my first time back in Hamilton since that Rumble. I'm sure WWE came there a few times after, I just don't remember. I'm not like Jim Cornette, I didn't keep a day-to-day diary of every single event,” he quipped.

Duggan, meanwhile, marvels like so many at what the annual pay-per-view has become.

"I don't think anybody had a clue how big the Royal Rumble would become. It's become one of the four (major) pay-per-views in WWE. Of course, I don't think anybody realized how big the WWE would become, the worldwide powerhouse that it is.”

For his part, Duggan said, he’s excited for the Hamilton show, partly to see his old friends and partly because he loves comic cons.

“The comic cons (are) amazing,” he said. “I've done comic cons in New Zealand, Australia, all through the States here and up in Canada a bunch. I do them with Henry Winkler, Lee Majors ... they're like, 'Hey, Hacksaw, I'm a big fan,' and I'm like, 'Well I'm a big fan, too!'

The Hamilton Comic Con runs September 30 and October 1 at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum and featured guests including Burt Ward, Ernie Hudson, Jon Heder, Bronson Pinchot, Karyn Parsons and many others.